Nema

I had just run on the treadmill. My clothes were soaked through. I was weighing my options between a swim in the pool or a cold shower.

I looked to my left and saw Constance and Nema walking down the beach. Constance wore a gold-chain necklace, tight jeans. Her hair was in exquisite and perfectly placed long braids. She had a soft smile on her face, high cheek bones. She carried her small mobile phone in her slender left hand.

Nema was wearing a worn t-shirt that showed the face of a woman who had run for Kenyan Parliament in 2013. The t-shirt was stretched, faded from the Mombasa sun, and Nema’s hair was much like mine, dancing wildly in the humidity. She looked like she had been walking for miles. Her feet were cracked, her legs scratched.

Nema motioned to me, holding an imaginary water bottle in her hand, tossing her head back quickly and pretending to drink. I realized she was motioning for the water bottle I held in my own hand. I had just filled it with delicious, cold, filtered water at the gym. Nema walked toward the rope that separated the luxury resort where I was staying from the public beach where she meandered.

I handed her the water bottle, and her hard facial expression broke into the most glamorous smile.

“Asante (thanks),” she said quietly.

We made acquaintance, and of course, as a foreign object of great interest to the girls, they asked if I wanted to hang out. And of course I did.

I gave Constance my contact and told them to return to the same spot tomorrow.

I had expected to receive a “What’s App” message from Constance if our date was still on, but never did. The next day, I walked outside to relax after conducting an interview in Mombasa. And there she was. Nema was sitting, alone, in the bright sun, near the rope divider, motioning again, fake water bottle in hand. Her hair was dancing even more wildly than yesterday, her face harder, and her legs covered in sand.

As I approached, there it was again, that glamorous smile – perfect white teeth and bright eyes – a different person than the moment before. I asked if she still wanted to hang out, and she said, yes, strongly, affirmatively. So, I took her hand and we ducked under the rope, both of us smiling brightly.

One lone security officer stands post between the public beach and the resort, and I soon saw he was following behind us, quickening his steps to catch up.

“You can’t bring her in here,” he said.

“But this is my Rafiki,” I said, my face hardening like Nema’s. I had been proud to use my favorite of the Swahili words I had learned in Kenya. Rafiki means friend.

The guard started to look stressed.

“She is just a girl,” I responded to his facial expression.

To settle the dispute, he called in his comrades. Three more security officers headed our way.

“I want to take her swimming,” I said.

They smiled, amused by my adventure with the teen, not taking me seriously. So, I then left the negotiations to Nema. After a few minutes of conversation in Swahili, they returned to English.

I was granted public places in the hotel only, and no more ducking ropes. Nema had to come and go from the front entrance where the majority of the security guards are posted. There would be no swimming.

The deal had been brokered.

Nema and I ate dinner together, next to the fake waterfalls falling into a pond covered with lily pads. She stared at her fellow African ladies with full make-up, polished nails, and nannies to watch over their plump and rambunctious children. She listened as a man with whom I shared a taxi from the airport complained insensitively, as he walked by, that the beach here was too dirty for his little girl to build a sandcastle.

“You need to visit South Coast,” he said. “Much cleaner there.”

I showed Nema my iPhone. Her eyes were wide with delight. We opened Spotify, which unleashes the world of music to anyone with access—a new world for Nema. I asked her about her favorite song—“Despacito” by Justin Bieber. She ate her plate of chicken and fries ravenously. We listened to Bieber sing. 

“Turn every situation into heaven…oh yeah…”

For the most part, Nema was quiet and hard, but sometimes she opened up and relaxed. When she did, I learned that she has been in and out school, sometimes with the school fees to go and sometimes not. She loves to play football (soccer). I learned that she never knew her father. Her mom died from cancer when Nema was 11. She lives with her auntie who sells some sort of Swahili food by the road. She has four brothers. Her family is Islamic. She is not interested in boys. One of her brothers builds beds for a living when he can afford the wood. She sleeps on a mat on the floor.

I asked her what happens when she doesn’t have her school fees. She said she “hustles."

The word “hustle” could mean many things, and English is Nema's second language. But somehow I knew: that was the hard look. Maybe "hustling" is how she got back to her spot on the beach the next day. I couldn't be certain. She told me she had taken a Tuk Tuk. In this area, it is quite well known that Tuk Tuk drivers are men, and they are men who accept sex for their services. Thirty percent of teenage girls, here, become pregnant before they become adults, and sex work for many young girls is a way of life.

Now, I am making assumptions, like I am forced to do when I write about my experiences as I travel. But I was not about to ask Nema her full story. We had only just met. I didn’t want her to go there, to break her short-lived smile. I wanted her to love the moment.

I closed out our bill, and I could  hear a sort of desperation in her voice.

“When can I come tomorrow?,” she asked.

I know myself. I’m too soft, too trusting, but I needed her to smile again.

“Same time, 4 pm.”

I sent her home in a taxi with Minnie, a large Kenyan woman, with a nose ring like mine and an infectious laugh. I asked Minnie to pick her up again tomorrow and to bring her back to the same spot.

I slid the door closed to Minnie’s taxi. I slowly waved goodbye. Nema's smile disappeared, but I knew I would see it again tomorrow.

Nema wouldn’t be taking a Tuk Tuk tonight.

Listening to Daniel

Disclaimer: As all my blog posts do, this post reflects my limited perspective. I spent only a snapshot of time in Nairobi. While there, I visited a university, stayed at a lovely hotel, and toured around with my colleagues. I by no means profess to know a thing about Kenya or Kenyan politics.

The ride back to the Nairobi airport took about 45 minutes, but felt more like 20. Traffic was moving at a healthy clip, much smoother than the three-hour trek across Nairobi from Kenyatta University to my hotel yesterday. Daniel was driving and sparking some good conversation, and I was listening.

Daniel told me why my ride by the State House took hours yesterday. Kenneth Matiba had died, and Kenyans were out in droves to mourn him. Matiba was known for his struggle to create a multiparty democracy in Kenya. And the sitting president Uhuru Kenyatta is the result.

Daniel professed his love for Uhuru. Uhuru has a penchant for shaking his security detail, jogging through the streets of Nairobi, driving himself around against the wishes of the State, and drinking beer. He is known for being a real person, not a politician, and for his free spirit. Daniel didn’t mention any of his specific policies, but he did mention his respect for a president who had recently calmed political tensions in his country by offering his rival a seat as Deputy President in his administration. He offered a hand of peace in the name of unity.

As an American, it was hard to imagine.

I learned about the 42 tribes in Kenya from Daniel, himself a Kikuyu like Uhuru. But, he promised, he does not admire him for their tribal allegiances. He admires him for his candor, and willingness to listen, not to the rich and powerful, but to the everyday Kenyans. He smiled widely as he recalled stories of Uhuru, the son of the legendary President Jomo Kenyatta, who as a child used to sneak out from the home in his village in Central Kenya to play with the village children. Even then, he wasn’t the son of the great politician, he was Uhuru, a small boy just like all of the others.

Daniel’s stories confirmed what I learned the day before. As we moved by the Kenyan State House at a snail’s pace, where all sitting presidents are meant to reside, I was told a story about how Uhuru had opened part of the grounds to a girls’ school that didn’t have space to play sports outside. I was told another story about how a small child kicked a soccer ball over the wall of the State House and found his President standing there above him with the soccer ball in hand, smiling. I saw Uhuru’s “private residence,” where he sleeps, close to, but outside of the State House grounds.

In my 36 hours in Nairobi, I’ve done a lot of listening. And I’ve learned a small bit about Kenyans in Nairobi: They are open. They are intellectual. They love to talk politics. They are friendly and welcoming. They are patriotic.

I’ve learned a few things about the country too. Kenya has banned plastic bags. Its constitution has made addressing gender disparities paramount. One-third of jobs in every sector must go to women.

I imagine there are quite a few young men and women like Daniel: forward-thinking and smart, who are open to sharing and listening. I could see Barack Obama here, listening to Daniel. I also know, of course, that Kenya has a slew of problems, like all countries, especially in this region. But listening to Daniel, I felt hopeful.

“Tat-wa-masi.” I am you. You are me.

Eight years since I had walked these streets. Everything had changed. The smallness, the peace and tranquility of Ubud had been invaded by high-end stores, throngs of white people, and so. much. traffic. The temples and the offerings were still there. The smell of incense still wafted around. But there was more aggression: stumbling tourists who wouldn’t give up their spot on the sidewalks. Motorbikes, so many of them, speeding up instead of slowing down as you crossed from one side of the road to the other. Sidewalks crumbling under the weight of the crowds. A Starbucks.

The monkeys made their sanctuary in monkey forest and didn’t leave. You no longer saw them hanging roadside, indulging in offerings to the gods. Instead, they were trying, their very hardest, to maintain their own peace and tranquility among herds of voyeuristic humans. I walked through monkey forest and watched as one little boy taunted a small monkey with an injured tail. The end of the monkey’s tail looked raw and painful. He dragged it behind him listlessly as he crawled around. When the monkey realized the little boy was laughing at his misfortune, he temporarily lost his mind. He ran at full speed after the boy, jumping up and tackling the boy from behind. The boy screamed in terror. The parents watched in horror. I was rooting for the monkey.

Just as I was rooting for old Ubud, when the monkeys chilled roadside. When magic instead of motorbikes emanated from the streets. When the temples were quiet and the few stores there were those of local artisans: the woman with the silk scarves, the painter, the wood maker, the sculptor. I remember hiking right out of Ubud to the rice terraces, through villages where I watched art in action. But those rice terraces, at least the ones nearest to downtown, have been razed. They’ve built new hotels to mimic the old. But you can’t fool the feeling they give you. The new hotels – the wood is too shiny, the carvings too sharp.

But, of course, with the bad, comes good: a boom to the local economy, an economic boom to local families.

Despite all the change, I found solace in Hotel Okawati. Nestled down a brick alley, away from the crowds, Okawati was still the quiet, peaceful space it was eight years ago. The same ornate fixtures and statues welcomed you home. There was solitude around the pool, slightly green from the algae at one end. The same cool tile floors welcomed your feet in from the humidity. The sheets were still paper thin. There was no shower curtain and a single bar of the same type of generic soap sat by the tub. The same light green tea cup was turned upside down on the table outside my door. I ate the same breakfast: a fried egg, pineapple and watermelon sprinkled with coconut, and  small bowl of yogurt and honey. The staff came by and set offerings near the statues on my porch each morning, incense blowing into my room and out toward the alleyway. Okawati was still simple. And in its simplicity and aversion to change, I found peace.

On the drive back from Ubud, I learned the Indonesian (Hindu) term for the feeling Okawati gifted me. “Tat-wa-masi.” “I am you. You are me.”

I felt like Okawati understood. In the midst of so much change, some things need to stay the same. This is the grand paradox for the nomad: finding so much peace in

inertia.

Running: A Love Story (stolen from a book by the same name)

I hadn't run in about a week; with work and travel and then the rules that tell us we won't be safe outside the walls of the hotel. With the heat and pollution and ruts in the road, I wouldn't get far anyways. The high is supposed to be 108 today and at 9 am temperatures were climbing far into the 90s.

But I made it downstairs to the single treadmill. I hate running on treadmills. Most runners do. We enjoy the space of the outdoors, the silence of the sky above, opening up for a sprint and feeling like our minds open with our speed. I've always enjoyed learning about new places through my runs, seeing roads and trails I never would have seen - little glimpses inside people's homes as they awake for coffee, sometimes, what they've planted in their gardens, the different shades of greens in the trees. These are things you don't see from inside a vehicle.

But today in Ouagadougou the single treadmill in the basement called out to me. I hopped on and started running. All the pressure inside my head defused. The sweat washed out the stress inside me. The a/c barely churned, so the sweat was profuse - just what I needed to make it through the day.

I've struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and big changes in my life over the past two or so years - my mother's death, divorce, new relationships, relocating - have made the depression -flanked with whole hours and sometimes days and nights filled with anxiety  - so much worse.

In all my writing, I've rarely ever admitted to this thing called "depression." It seems so silly and superficial when you are traveling in an effort to fix some of the world's problems, and these problems are huge: poverty, gender-based violence, hunger, thirst.

I talked to a woman in Yemen who  had 11 children, one dying after the other from conditions of poverty. Despite these circumstances, she kept getting pregnant again and again, nevertheless, because she didn't have any money to purchase contraception and even if she did, pharmacies with condoms and pills don't exist where she lives, and who knows if her husband would have even allowed them to use either. The woman said she was around my age at the time - barely more than 30 -- although she didn't know her exact age, She looked more like 55.

I've seen men, grown men, scramble in the sand for Cheerios I had dropped because they were so hungry. I've seen people digging meters and meters in to the hard, dry earth just to find water. I've written about little girls who were married off at the age of 8. I've seen people drinking water that looks like mud.

So, depression: what do I really have to be depressed about besides this never-ending string of global strife? I'll never really know - maybe it is just a genetic chemical imbalance passed down through my mother or maybe I am just too fortunate - a fortunate one - where even the slightest graying of the sky can turn my mood down.

All that I know is that running is my greatest love, my only antidote, no matter where in the problematic world I've landed.

Youth: A Dream Spent

I flew in and it wasn’t the same. I was no longer young and wanderlusting. I was just there landing after 24 hours of travel to Africa to do my job—to help organize a conference, to write a few things, to survive the jet lag, and to remember to drink only bottled water. I looked out the window of the SUV transporting us to our hotel and I saw the dust and dirt, the poverty, the dark streets; felt the ruts and deep holes in the roads. I could smell the pollution seeping through the closed windows. And unlike in 2009, when I landed in Burkina Faso’s neighbor, Niger, and I sensed an adventure, making a possible small, meager contribution to "saving the world," learning something about myself, at least, growing, here, I felt nothing, no possibility at all. Yes, the poverty is sad, but it hasn’t overwhelmed, and it never goes away.

The world continues to tick on. Poverty remains. The same black plastic bags littering the streets of Niamey in 2009 stayed there, never disintegrating, littering, just the same, the streets of Ouagadougou. We try to help, to make things better, but so little actually does any good at all. And that mentality of 'helping' is fraught with so many connotations; are we helping or just happy to be of the intention of doing no harm?

I still feel elated by the kindness, warmth, and generosity of the Burkinabe women who work for Pathfinder here. Sarat is so tall and in her height and stealth, she commands energy. Her laugh is infectious. I could never tire of Sarat. So, I guess, women like Sarat are the flowers in the piles of dirt and plastic bags.

It still seems absurd to host these events at hotels that cost more each night than a Burkinabe might earn in six months. But we do. We need to be secure. Last year, a terrorist attack maimed and killed NGO workers just like us, at a hotel just like this, in this very city. So, we come to these countries, stay in these places, spend thousands of dollars to host these events that we hope will ignite change, but it is never easy to determine if they actually do anything at all. So, there you go, with my youth has gone my idealism and the allure for “adventure” travel with it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been impressed and inspired by so many of our programs—in DRC, Ethiopia, in Yemen, before the country devolved into war and we had to vacate. They have offered so many women and girls a chance they never would have had without our investments. But the allure of my travel here, its point, the investment in it, newly mystifies me.

Maybe I’ll walk the block tomorrow, sweat out the 106 degree midafternoon funk, try to be inspired, even affected by where I am—try to get back that gratitude I once had for being able to make these trips at all; for perspective and growth and being able to see how the world lives.

Or maybe I'll realize I'm not really the nomad I thought I always was. Maybe I'm ready to settle and feel like I'm home. 

Disagreeable Woman in DRC

You look around Kinshasa and you see lots of men. You see women too, but the men are everywhere. They hang out, they sell random things. One man was dangling a tiny puppy and a tiny kitty from each hand in an effort to get someone in traffic to stop for him. They saturate the lounge at our hotel: the powerful men in their fancy suits, who most likely are in some sort of favor with the country’s current president.

On one evening, I did attempt to go a block up the road to a nearby restaurant that someone—a woman—from USAID had recommended to me. The restaurant made pizza, and man was I craving it. Well, within a half a block I knew it would be impossible. There they were: the men. I didn’t smile back and I kept on walking, but the attention didn’t stop. It was only when one overly eager fellow, probably in his 50s, started yelling, I decided it was time to turn around head back to the hotel. I killed my dream of that pizza slice.

“Tu es jolie!,” he said once, then louder twice. He then began yelling. He was reaching to grab one of my hands. If I had been in the DR Congo longer, I might have yelled back at him, or at least had a skin thick enough to keep on walking toward my destination. But I’m a newcomer, and as a newcomer, I always take precaution. It was still light out when I left the hotel, but the sun would be falling soon and there was no reason to have an incident to remember for the rest of my life. It was another dinner at the hotel for me. The life of a woman abroad.

It’s true. Men do rule DR Congo. But I guess that’s not so different from most of the world. Here, it just seems more pronounced. They are the politicians, the investors, the bankers, the leaders, and even the nurses in many of the communities where we work. They are the drivers, the housekeepers at the hotel, and a large portion of the servers. They are the majority of our country office staff, although our few strong women make up for the dearth in numbers. They are the reason for the 5 million deaths that took place in various DR Congo’s internal and regional conflicts from 1996 until 2003 and into present day. They are why more than 200,000 women were raped during those wars and why gender-based violence is still such a huge problem in the country.

I know there are good men in DR Congo. There are good and bad men everywhere, but in the book I’m reading, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, it is evident that men have the power and the sway in DR Congo. They are the root of the country’s many problems. In fact, I want to write a letter to Jason Stearns, the author of that book, to please write a second account, one that tells the history of DR Congo from the female perspective. In his book, it is just one man sabotaging the country after the other. I wonder what the women were saying during those wars, if they had the chance to say anything at all. I’d like to write that book, actually, but then I would need to live in the DR Congo, that man’s world, for long enough to gain the trust of Congolese women. And that would be near impossible.

Jason Stearns, in fact, was back in the DRC when I was, reporting on violence in the north east of the country. I just read that as I was packing my bags to return to the US, the government expelled him from its soil. I do not need to find out what the government might do to a disagreeable woman like me.

***

I never wrote about my “friend” from the flight I was on from Paris to DR Congo. He knew Jason Stearns and was anonymously interviewed for his book.

I spent about three hours practicing my French with this man on the plane. He lives in Switzerland with his Swiss wife and two kids, but is originally from DRC. He works in "security systems" for unsecure countries. We talked about his job, my job, Congolese politics, his impending divorce, and my divorce (although I didn’t dare tell his the sex of my ex). We argued about Donald Trump, his pick for the next American President. He was very interested in the fact that I was reading Jason's book. 

He not only knows Jason, but he is also a close comrade of President Joseph Kabila’s. He is the Congolese elite: the money and the power and perhaps, but I can’t prove it, la corruption.

The first night we landed in Kinshasa he had asked my colleague and I to get a drink with him. But I had declined. I was just too tired. I didn’t think any more of it.

After I returned back from Mutshatsa, there he was, hanging out in the chic lounge with the other Congolese elite. He was with two friends who looked a lot like him. Big, solid, tall, Congolese men dressed to the nines.

I had sat down in the chic bar to read my book for a while before heading back up to bed and he approached me. “Bonjour, Laurel!”

Oh boy.

He summoned me to the table with his friends. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t feel like engaging. I approached the table to introduce myself, hoping the conversation would be short. It was, to some extent. I had a short argument in my broken French with one of his friends, a Pentecostal pastor, about family planning. He asked why “us family planning people” tell women how many children to have. I told him, nicely, that that is a misconception. Our work is based on fertility preferences, which means, a woman (with her partner) can decide how many children they want to have and when, when offered access to contraception. A woman can choose the method she wants, if she wants one at all. I told him we support contraceptive access, in turn to support the health of women and their families.

“But what about the men?” he asked. “What do you do for the men?”

Oh boy.

I told him that whenever possible we engage men in decisions about family planning: a) to win their support for allowing their wives to choose the contraceptive she wants (because women in this country and many others do not have the social power to make decisions on their own); and b) so that they too might use contraception, most importantly, condoms for further protection, particularly from sexually transmitted infections.

Soon after the little discussion, his friends disappeared and it was just me and the Swiss man. And soon after that, a glass of red wine was traveling toward our table. He wanted to continue our discussion, but without his friends. I decided in a public place it would be fine to have a glass of red wine, maybe even nice, and he hadn’t done anything to make me mistrust him, yet, so what was the harm?

About five minutes into our conversation, he began hitting on me. I learned the word for seductive in French and he pleaded with me to meet him for dinner the next night, dancing out at a club, or at least breakfast in the morning. I said I didn’t think I had time, and that I had to work, and that I just wasn’t interested, not even in the most remote sense of the word.

I went back to my hotel room and thought about what I had been reading in my book, about his friends in high places, and maybe even about him. They buy their way to power. They finance killing and corruption that keeps them in high places while the majority of their fellow Congolese live in abject poverty. They take what they want. They control the destitution.

It is no wonder Mr. Swiss likes Mr. Trump. They have a lot in common. They are rich. They are aggressive. They are misogynistic. They are everything that makes me a proud, righteous feminist.

Chances and Choice

After a chaotic trip from Lumumbashi yesterday, we landed back in DR Congo’s capital city: Kinshasa. I didn’t see much of Kinshasa on my first trip from the airport. It was dark and I was subsumed with fatigue. But this time, despite an all-night rager among Congolese men in the hotel room next to mine the night before, I was awake.

When you travel out of the Kinshasa airport, you soon hit the bustle of a typically developed African city. There are massive traffic jams, suggested traffic lights, and people who decide to make their own turn lanes in the middle of the jam. Teenage boys run around in the traffic, selling Fanta, biscuits, bottles of water. There are people everywhere and there is this explosive energy. Minibuses, the same ones I rode in South Africa, in my 20s, are everywhere.

But now I’m not allowed to ride minibuses. By our project standards, they are not safe. Our project arranges our travel from the airport with a contracted travel service. We hop off the plane and we see a man with a chalkboard listing our names. We follow him to an air conditioned office behind the airport, he grabs our bag tags, and we rest there until he brings us our belongings and we are ready to hop into his van. Here, the service is called “Jeffrey Travels.”

Here, “Jeffrey Travels” serves the elite.

The chaos eventually dissipates into a section of the city with nicer buildings—real buildings, not roadside shacks and makeshift stores. These are government buildings: the national airlines conglomerate, the ministry of health, the ministry of finance. The government buildings usher us into an even nicer part of town: the place where the expatriates rest, and where we stay. There are well-pruned gardens filled with tropical flowers and an elderly Congolese man sweeps the dirt from the street corner with a small broom.

We re-enter the hotel we entered just a week ago after arriving from the US. But it looks different now, even more extravagant. I notice the pieces of art on the walls, and the beautiful sculptures of African women, who look more like Ethiopians than Congolese, behind the reception desk. I didn’t see anything like those sculptures when I went to the market with Dr. Jacquie in Lumumbashi. I imagine those sculptures were made in Europe. Electronic music pulses from the chic bar to the right of the reception desk where well-dressed Congolese business men drink cocktails along with a few, like me, who are dressed-down and probably represent the UN and NGO crowd.

I am shown to my room and everything is so clean, cleaner than I remember. I know I will sleep well. I open my window and look down and to my right and I see the pool. It is huge and blue and inviting. Fancy Arabs smoke Hookahs around it, white people who have turned slightly pink take in the African sun even though they don’t need any more of it, a group of men, probably around my age, who seem to spend a lot of time at the gym to build their hard physiques, play around in the pool. I am still in Congo, but I am in another world.

I start to think about the kids in Mutshatsa, with their little dirty hands, their big smiles, their huge joys, their huge sorrows. They will never see a pool like this. I start to cry, just a little bit; the insanity that is the difference between the have and have-nots. I think I must be too sensitive or maybe just hungry and tired after my days in the field and few calories. But it all just seemed too sad. I don’t think this clean, developed way of life necessarily buys happiness—but it does buy chances and choice.

My life has been filled with so many chances, so much choice, since I was a little baby born in California. My parents easily chose to stop having any more children and I ended up an only child. Their choice gave me the chances to take piano lessons, dance lessons, riding lessons. It gave me my education—my key to the future: Montessori school as a small child, a scholarship to a renowned private school, acceptance at an Ivy League university, and everything else thereafter. It gave me the chance to travel and be a mzungu in Africa.

At my renowned high school, I took an African history class and Middle Eastern history class, and without voyaging, I gained some global perspective on how the world works. At a young age, I gained a keen awareness of the great global discrepancy between the have and have-nots. That African history class was my favorite class. I learned about the sordid history of the continent and how colonialism contributed to where so many African countries are today. I was fascinated, disgusted, and I wanted to help. And I guess that is what I am trying to do today.

Sitting in this hotel, I am reminded how great the problems really are. We’ll never fix them. But I’ll continue to do my part.

The Mzungu in Mutshatsha (Moo-cha-cha)

Mzungu: The Bantu language term used in the African Great Lakes region to refer to people of European descent. Literally translated it meant "someone who roams around aimlessly" or "aimless wanderer."

There’s always that time on these journeys when development ceases to be. It may end for a day, a couple of days, sometimes an entire month or longer. You would be surprised. I don’t find it too difficult to acclimate. Give me two weeks and I won’t remember that I used to shower every day, wash my clothes, have Internet service, have toilet paper, hop in my car to drive down a smooth paved road to find whatever I want within a 10-mile radius. I might fantasize about having some nice cheese and red wine, but I won’t find it strange that I can’t drink what comes out of the tap or that I eat only starch and sugar (because I still can’t bring myself to eat meat). But that first taste, it is always a shock.

That shock for me today came about 20 minutes outside of Kolwezi on our journey to a place called Mutshatsa (pronounced Moo-cha-cha). The paved road abruptly disappeared. For 180 kilometers and 4 hours we were whipped, whacked, bumped, and tumbled up a red dirt road. I would arguably say it was the worst road I have ever traveled on: worse than Niger where it was sand instead of rock, worse than Ethiopia where it was paved but drivers meandered from their side of the road to ours, and way worse than the back route in Swaziland I took with a car full of naïve young women, just like me, when I was 21 years old.

We dodged and tackled 3’ deep ditches in the road filling with water, and we drove almost off into the bush to allow the dated mac trucks, with the many men, kids, and minerals piled high to pass without crushing us. I was grabbing the “oh shit” handle almost the entire way. The one time I did let go, I whacked my head on the top of the window—such a mzungu. When I looked around the car, all Congolaise and one Nigerian, I was the only one who had a hold on that handle.

Let me put this in perspective. These are the roads that must be used by Congolaise to get to the nearest health center and by the health system to deliver essential supplies and commodities. Our community-based distributors use bikes when they need to visit households beyond a walking distance—and our supervisors ride motorbikes. Two of three motorbikes are in disrepair. About three hours into the journey, my body felt in disrepair.

We saw few other cars, especially when we got more than 50 km from Kolwezi. We did see the occasional mac truck, but it was mostly desolate. In the beginning, where the big mines are, you see the men with their bikes stacked high, with 6, 7, 8 large bags of rocks, meandering along these potholed “roads” (if you can call those gaping ditches potholes and if you can call those rocky paths roads). You see women, sometimes with wood or water stacked on their heads, but they too, soon disappear. When it becomes more rural, you occasionally pass through a village where whole families are bathing in the river together, laying their clothes to dry in the tall grass nearby.

The trees along the way stand tall and proud. They are many shapes, but all of them are large like their country and strong like their people, especially their women. Even the areas where mining has likely polluted the water table below, the trees don’t fall. They’ve survived brutal wars, like many natural wonders of the Congo, but I worry for their future.

Le Chinois, the Americans, they are taking our copper, our gold, and now our trees, I have been told by a few Congolaise.

As we got closer to Mutshatsta, the road just kept getting worse. About 20 kilometers out the road was merely 3 deep crevices running parallel to one another. Like I said, I acclimate. By hour 4, I was ready to get out of the car, but I had also gotten used to it.

That rocky-rock-and-roll ride was all worth it. We rode up and throngs of young Congolese were waiting at the entrance to the health zone to usher us in. They sang in Swahili, so I don’t know what they were saying, but there was a lot of cheer. I did hear our project acronym, and I thought, wow, okay so we are making difference, even out here. In front of the zonal health office, a group of them broke into a dance and, believe me, there was such spirit, I had to stop myself from going out there to shake it with them. While I was watching, two young girls handed me bouquets of fake flowers, a magenta bunch and a fluorescent orange bunch. I’ve heard most of them have never seen a mzunga before, so I am sure that is why I was getting all that attention, but, regardless, it was a warm welcome. Instead of balking at the stranger, the different one, they were welcoming me. We can all learn a lesson from that.

We came to Mutshasta to see another community event, where people can learn about contraception and pick up a contraceptive method of their choice for free. I spoke with a young, unmarried woman with two children who now has pills. I spoke with a young man who advocates with other young men to use condoms. Before our project became involved, no one I talked to had known about contraception. I spoke with one 33 year old woman who has 7 children, but can now stop giving birth. I watched another young woman, 31 with 5 children, receive an implant in a small, thatched roof hut, with the door propped open so that the nurse would have light.

I’ve heard many times on my trip: “Why now? Where was your project before?,” and I heard it again today.  

The small children, the large groups of them who represent the large families of the Congolese, followed me around, as any brave child would if they saw something they had never seen before. I snapped photos of them and then they snapped photos of each other and me. As is habitual for me, I loved them all and could have stayed there with them forever. But I was pulled away (as I always am).

We are staying in a guest house owned by the government. The roof is rusting, we just got power after hours without, and the bathroom, well, it is not what I had in Kolwezi. I was glad I had an extra set of clean sheets. The infamous photo of President Kabila watches over the living room, where there is oversized leopard print furniture. There was a single piece of cooked pasta hanging off a hook in my room and a little white lizard traipsed around by the window. By most Americans standards, this place would be pretty abhorrent, but, here, this place is for the rich, like me.

As has been the case throughout the week, the Congolese I travel with skip lunch and have a huge dinner. I am usually shy about announcing my mzungu Western preference for maintaining a vegetarian diet, but when I was offered goat on the first night, I couldn’t lie. Since then, they have gone out of their way to make sure there are fish or beans to eat along with the foufou. Even, here, tonight, I know they added that extra fish dish for me, and I couldn’t eat it. My stomach turned when I saw it. It was black fish skin mixed in with every other part of the fish, I mean EVERY PART, and the smell bothered me. I ate my foufou and tried to hide my dislike, but I was caught in action—the mzungu stomach. Yes, I do admit.

Dr. Jacquie turned to me: “You, humanitarian, you need an international stomach!”

Yeah, I am still working on that one.

I don’t feel hungry now. In fact, I feel very full, knowing that our project is doing good work, and I can be a part of it. I feel so lucky that I’ve had the honor to meet these people, who, despite their customs, and their isolation, are open to change. They just want the power to make their lives better like we all do. I hope they can give themselves that over time and we can continue to help them along the way.

Family Planning is Not the Ugly Stepchild—It is a Lifeline for DRC

We traveled Manika health zone today, about 30 minutes from our home base in Kolwezi.

Jimmy, the director of the health zone told us, yes, your project is making a difference. “Men have learned that women are not just an instrument of men.” He said men have started to help out around the household, cooking on the weekends, and “cultivating” with their wives.

I want to believe him, but our project has been in true operation for just under a year. I am sure there are seldom cases where a man decides to dedicate his weekend to cooking for his 7, 8, 14 children, but I just don’t buy it that that is the norm—just yet.

But Jimmy, like we do, wants to show the project is successful. He wants the funds to continue with the good work.

That is the problem with these short-lived projects like ours. We come, we make a difference, sometimes a phenomenal difference in a short amount of time, but usually for a very small population, or with an approach that the government won’t support on its own.

Governments have their priorities, and family planning is often the ugly step child.

If they can do it, they will, but they will do other things first: things that are more acceptable, maybe a bit easier—fighting malaria, vaccines, offering sustainable water sources, even making deliveries safe for women.

Sexual and reproductive health—of which family planning is a part—is not always so popular. But in reality family planning affects EVERYTHING else. Without contraception, families will continue to procreate and suffer, without enough resources to support the children they love. Often, their children will die young, and sometimes they will too: working in hazardous conditions to make enough money to have a meal each day, or giving birth at age 14, and then year after year after year. Many of the kids that do survive will not have the chance to be educated, and without that, they will live in a cycle of endless poverty. The country will suffer too. Without an educated population, how will DRC ever prosper, grow, and move toward democracy and human rights?

Today, a lady nurse told me one of her clients she saw the other day was just 3 years younger than myself, 33, and she had 9 children. 9 children! She never knew that contraceptives were even an option before her husband heard about them from one of our community-based distributors. He went home to his wife and demanded that she stop having kids (like it was her fault) and get something called an implant. She rushed off to the health center the next day, and voila—perhaps she will be a mother of 9 and not 14—perhaps.

Two of the older lady community-based distributors I chatted with today had 14 children. The other 5 had no less than 5 children, but most had closer to 10. Long before contraceptives became available in their communities, they didn’t have a choice.

I feel very strongly about the work we are doing here and I want it to continue long after I step back on that plane to Washington, DC. I want it to continue for the 14 children of Marie Jeanne and Kashala and for the DR Congo as a whole.

I want there to be more women in DR Congo like Dr. Jacquie Bapura, a beautiful elegant pediatrician who joined our project in Katanga as a provincial coordinator because NGOs pay more money than working at public-sector hospitals. She lives away from her two children, who reside in Kinshasa (a 2-hour plane ride), to make the money she needs to have a respectable life. She lives with her sister, who cooked us dinner every night—a necessary and silent partner on our trip here in DR Congo. But there is little chance that women with 5, 7, 8, 14 children will ever become DR Congo’s next set of Dr. Jacquie Bapuras.

Mining for Life

The first thing we saw when we walked into the Director of Health’s Office in Fungurume Zone, Katanga Province, DRC, was one photo on a barren cement wall: it was of a newborn baby, its face deformed, and lying in its own pool of blood. The photo was hung in a cheap tin frame. The whole team of us, even the doctors and the public health professionals who had worked in some of the most desperate conditions—IDP camps on the Congolese border with Rwanda and Uganda—were staring. One of our senior advisors finally got up the nerve to ask: What is photographed there?

The director told us “this is the result of copper and cobalt mining in Fungurume.”

I couldn’t focus on whatever else the Health Director said for the next few minutes, probably several formalities of the many since we have engaged in since arriving in DRC . All that I could focus on was the horror.

The only other photo on his wall was the mandatory one: of President Kabila. As far as I can surmise, that photo is seen hanging in every public office. Kabila’s face is so familiar to me now. It covers billboards on the roads leading to Kolwezi with the slogan “Mon Congo”  - My Congo. 

Along with the billboards, when you drive through Katanga Province, one of the biggest mining destinations on the planet—copper and cobalt, uranium and gold—you see the beautiful mountain-scape punctuated by depots where the mined resources are bought and sold. You see long roads up to the mountains, sometimes behind huge chain-linked fences, where dump trucks enter and exit on a continuous basis. You see barracks where some of the hired miners live. They look like prisons.

On the other side of the road from the natural treasure chests are squatter camps where artisanal miners have set up camp to trek into and out of the mines. They are like freelance miners. They do not work for a company, but for themselves. They scrape what they can together to sell to the big companies that control the exports—most of them Chinese. I’ve heard the big companies pay them scraps compared to what these minerals, and the products that come from them, go for on an international market. I believe them. They are living in squalor.  

You will see large plastic bags loaded to the top with the minerals, stacked in minivans, on motorcycles, and on people’s backs, until they can reach the nearest depot and sell them for a small fraction of what they are worth.

The men under the mountains picking away at their living and carting around the heavy sacks need to do it. They are often supporting 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 children.

That’s why the work we are doing here is EXCITING. It is IMPORTANT.

We went to the central market today to witness an outreach event organized by our project. At these events, bands of trained health volunteers, called community-based distributors, tell the community about all the family planning methods that are now available to them and refer them to a makeshift “clinic” at the back of the market where women can receive counseling from a trained health provider, and if they wish, the contraceptive of their choice.

And many do wish. When the community-based distributors took out their megaphones and started announcing their presence to the market, flocks of women—and men—arrived at their tables. They wanted to know about this thing called family planning, in the hopes they could make things for their families just a little bit easier.

So, we are addressing one tiny slice of what these populations need for one small slice of time.

Welcome to the Heart of Africa

I’d missed Africa. After I landed in Kinshasa yesterday and left the air conditioned airport, I stepped out into the thick, humid air.  It was almost as if I carried a cloud down from the sky with me. Following a recently departed winter back home, that humid air felt like a gift.

After my colleague who is traveling with me left one of his bags mistakenly inside and ran like a bolt of lightning back into the airport, I waited there on the sidewalk with the throngs of Congolese. They wore Western dress and African dress and many held signs with Western names on them—Congolese there to safely transport foreigners within what are notoriously known as unsafe borders.

To my left was a raucous gathering of people my age or slightly younger. When they saw their friends and family members arrive from inside, they let out cries of pure joy—a kind of joy that seeps into you and rests there for a while: another gift. They embraced their loved ones with such force that couples of them almost of fell to the ground. It was unbridled emotion, not something you see often in the US. Or, even if you see something akin, you certainly aren’t gifted the same feeling very often: that feeling of not really being all alone this world, of communion, of solace with other human beings. It is something we search for all of the time, but rarely find.

So, my first thank you to DRC came at that very moment. 

The warm, fuzzy feeling, of course, comes along with quite the opposite. After all, it is Africa’s heart, my love, my continent of paradox.

I’m reading a book while I’m here, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which is bound to pepper my blog posts from here forward. As the title suggests, the book chronicles la catastrophe that is Congo’s history and politics. “The Congo has always defied the idealists,” writes the author.

My idealism, my captured joy, took a strong hit the next morning when we returned to the airport to take an in-country flight to Lumumbashi, one of the largest cities in DRC outside of Kinshasa, far to the East and known for the province in which it is located—Katanga—one of the most mineral-rich places on the planet. I returned with my colleague, a Nigerian doctor, to the airport and it didn’t take long for DRC‘s politics to start to seep in. Because he is Nigerian, the immigration officials said he could not travel outside of the capital due to a sour political relationship between West African countries and DRC. 

I was quickly ushered into the immigration office (because my colleague does not speak French), where I had to argue, in my very mediocre French, for 45 minutes about how he is a respectable doctor, how we have visas for the travel, how our work is important to people in the rural provinces of Katanga, how we are supported by their friend, the US Government. It was only after I softened my tone with the two men (one who was asleep for the first half of my arguments) that they softened as well. I stopped trying to strong-arm them and instead smiled politely, maybe even slightly flirtatiously, to win the favor. The only thing left to do after winning my argument was to have a lady security guard make some photocopies of our documents for us. I followed her through the airport to the photocopy machine, where she paused, stood with her arms folded, stared at me for a good 15 seconds with a disapproving face, and rubbed her two fingers together.

“L’argent!” Bien sur, l’argent.

I handed her 5 $1 bills out of the stack of 200 singles I was told to bring for just such situations. She held out for more, but when I stood my ground, transforming from soft to hard again, she slowly moved toward the window where the photocopies were made.

In my two weeks here, I have no doubt that I will capture at least a few more palpable joys, and, at the same time, I will lose just a little more faith in humanity.

Wanderlusting to Home

I have always been a wanderer, a nomad. Although I have settled in one place or another for relatively long stretches of time, my heart has always ached to wander. Perhaps this is because I have never really felt at home in the various places I have lived: in between the rock gorges of Ithaca New York, at the precipice of the main line and White Anglo Saxon Protestant America, in our nation’s capital for more than a decade.  Perhaps it is the ever addictive pull of perspective.

But now I do, have a home. This farm, its hills, that magical breeze, the forest of trees, the gravel driveway underneath my feet, the long winters and the preciously short summers, the Technicolor dream coat of leaves that masks our perimeter in the fall, the sheets of rain that pour heavily on the tin roof, my horses as they run and chew and gnaw on the wooden fence boards, my dogs as they sleep and awake me each day just a little too early for my comfort. I call it home.

As much as I had always yearned to see Ethiopia, and, in fact, every single one of Africa’s 54 countries, on this last trip abroad, what gave me solace was home. The world is chaotic and its problems are infinite and of overwhelming magnitude. I now, after my 35 years here, finally see the value of home.

Life, of course, is showing me the danger of finding a home. This year has been unpredictable at best. Impermanence is shining its blinding light. The bedrock of my existence has been pulled from underneath me, first with the death of my mother and then with the dissolution of my marriage.

It’s no one’s fault but my own and the way fate has willed it, if fault can be declared at all. 

As life would have it, my home may now cease to be. It is dangerous, I think, to find our home in physical sense. I would imagine that the most happy of us all have that sense of home right there inside. They can find it there, where they live, or 10,000 miles away, on the other side of the world. It isn’t affected by a difference in smell, taste, and a sense of security. It is owning what is you.

In my wanderlust, I hope I can eventually travel to, grab, wrap myself around, and never let go of that elusive place I can call home. 

The Road to Nekemte

Boom. Flash. We were eating dinner at what is known as the nicest hotel in Nekemte and the rainy season had finally made its exuberant debut.

I will admit: my colleague and I definitely jumped. Nekemte, a vibrant city, 350 km to the West of Addis, is true Africa. It is the open markets and the dirt. It is the young and old and people moving, walking anywhere and everywhere. It rises out of nowhere, from the mountains and the lush green fields of teff, maize and sorghum. It is jumping and bustling, a sharp descent from another trip through God’s country.

Unlike my colleague who has traveled through Rwanda and Uganda and professes the road West of Addis to resemble her previous trips, I, myself, had never known such a journey. If I had to compare what I have seen in Ethiopia, Lalibela would be the dry peaks of the American southwest, while the mountain road West of Addis is the lush, green mountains I’d seen in parts of South Africa. But I hate to make a comparison that isn’t comparable.

The dirt is the perfect red-brown, and the people are poised to traverse the steep cliffs above and the muddy rivers below. They are tall and lean, with skin made to absorb the sun, the rain, and the dirt that only makes them seem more a part of the Earth. The green is tremendous and overwhelming. It feels as if the Earth has to be endlessly fertile and that the space around you will never end. It calms those aching, compulsive anxieties, and allows you to imagine a place where humankind could be born. This green universe could give birth to anything and everything, forever. It is only logical that the fertility rate remains high and many Ethiopians, despite their circumstance, continue and continue to procreate.

This natural wonder is punctuated, for the better and for the worse, by development. The road, the entire way from Addis to Nekemte is paved, which made the drive more pleasant, but also allowed for the easy passage of large trucks. They carry goods and materials, maybe to further the development of Addis. They dash precariously past, sometimes on the correct side of the road and sometimes almost not, their fumes lingering long after their descent down the mountain. Small- and medium-size villages arise every now and again, with the open-front storefronts and the same types of scenes that tend to characterize developing countries: animals wandering aimlessly; the shoeless, the shirtless, and the extraordinarily thin coupled with the young men and women in Western clothes who could be meandering down a street in Washington, DC. Many of them look at you in your ominous white SUV and you feel like a big gaping sore thumb invading what isn’t yours. At the same time, pastoralists with their herds block the road, some more accustomed to the passing traffic than others.

It was the new with the old: the heart of Africa, of the Earth, being pulled very slowly from itself.

When we finally arrived in Nekemte, seven hours later, we were ready to rest and eat. We walked into the hotel and were greeted by a strange smell. It was the mix of the ancient sauna on the lower levels (and the sweaty men using it), the Ethiopian meat being broiled in the restaurant, and the wet, humid air quickly moving in. Always sensitive to smells and still suffering from the nausea acquired in Lalibela, I shamelessly breathed conscious, shallow breaths.  When I got to my room on the third floor, I was met with at least 50 huge black moths that had entered the open window above the shower. Horrified at the sight of the insect tsunami, I asked for a room change.

I now sit at the penthouse level (floor 4) and I realize how sheltered I had let myself become since my hiatus in Niger and my trips abroad more than five years ago. Farmland Hotel has running water, a Western toilet, toilet paper, a real bed with linens, and even a television with four channels. I am staying in a country where the majority of people still live in abject poverty, female genital cutting persists, and girls are still forced to marry at an age when I was buying my first bra. I’ve become spoiled.

God's Country

After five days of hotel hopping in Addis, I finally found God’s country. I awoke at 5:15 am on Friday, the Ethiopian day of fasting, to jet to the airport. I was going to go at the trip alone, but I met a nice travel companion during my hotel hopping and conference managing to accompany. We boarded an early morning flight from Addis, touching down in Gondar, and quickly kissing the sky again above Lalibela. I closed my eyes on the tarmac in Gondar for a quick power nap and awoke just below the clouds and just above the towering mountain-scape for which Lalibela is known. The Lalibela airport is just a pinprick in the infinite space of its surrounding universe. Two floors and three rooms, we easily saw our names written in red marker, held by the drivers sent to pick us up and drive us through mountains to the historic city of Lalibela.

The drive is 35 kilometers, but can feel a bit longer because of the winding mountain roads, and because of the pastoralists and their animals: unaccustomed to vehicles and the necessity to hop out of the way upon their approach. There in that van, I definitely felt like I was invading a sacred space, one in which people are still unified with nature under God’s sky. People who look to be 70, 80 years old climb the mountains with loads of timber strapped to their backs. Men with long sticks steer their oxen, goats and donkeys up the long mountain pass. They are often almost shirtless, threadbare, and seem unequipped without water and sometimes without shoes. The women wear their long syrongs and worn sandals. They look as if they have climbed the entire mountain range, or have been dropped straight from the sky, their sharp features and lean figures an ideal for tackling life here on Earth. 

I reference God, here, not because I am a Christian, but because a trip to Lalibela will make you want to believe. Lalibela is famous for its ancient churches, built in the 12^th Century by King Lalibela and his army of angels. With a small pick ax and chisel, along with his angels, it is said that the 11 churches were built in just 23 years. Today, this may not seem remarkable, but when you see the tools and feel the density of the rock underneath your feet, you could almost believe an army of angels was indeed present. Lalibela was created as a second Jerusalem. King Lalibela made the Holy Land a more convenient place of worship for his chosen people by moving it to Ethiopia.

The Ethiopians are true believers. They believe in willing their lives to chance under the promise that God will inevitably have their backs. They still have many children with little resources and walk for miles in the name of God with little food in their stomachs. They believe in priests that extricate demons. The most devout believe that by bathing a barren woman in a fertility bath, she could become the next Virgin Mary. Living among the luminous mountains, the eternal sun,  the dry mountain air, the rain that falls just enough to allow the crops to flourish, and the forgiving clouds that often leave a sliver of sky open to the wandering eye, it is no wonder these people are believers. Ethiopians, the most exquisitely and structurally beautiful people I have ever seen, are living in God’s country.

That day in Lalibela, as we trekked through the rock face caves and gullies which connect the 11 churches through the mountains, we walked among the most devout. We happened to arrive on the Day of Michael, one of many religious holidays on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. Thousands of Pilgrims had also arrived to worship, to pray, to chant and to sing. They had come from across Ethiopia to celebrate their saint, young and old, but mostly old. Their faces told stories, but their feet told many more. Some of the oldest wore sandals worn to the dirt, and some of the youngest, sneakers and socks.

They prayed and kissed the rock-face churches. They fell to the feet of Jesus, as he was depicted 900 years ago. Some of them, they walked hundreds of miles to stand and kneel on the old carpets that cover the rocky church floors. A priest sits all day in each church. My mind wandered to how the priest is filled, his thoughts and his journeys as he keeps watch and leads prayer. His mind must wander so differently from mine, as the concept of being sedentary for long stretches of time, in the name of God, is about as foreign as Lalibela itself.

Over five years since I had stepped outside the confines of North America, Lalibela did feel infinitely foreign. Only there for 24 hours, there was no time to adjust to uneven rock, the high altitude, the smell of open fire, the sound of chanting prayers. A pack of mating dogs kept me up all night and I awoke in nausea from my ambitious lunch that included raw jalapenos. Even God’s country is still developing.

The Buoyancy of Travel

It has been almost five years since I took the sky and crossed space and time. I don't count a small jaunt to a luxury resort in Mexico  and I discount any journeys  constrained by my own national borders. I am including the kind of travel that makes you so weary without sleep you feel high and completely disconnected from time and space. It had been half a decade since I engaged in this type of travel - since I stepped off of a plane from Sana'a Yemen and arrived back in Virginia. I carried with me a taste of honey perfume that I have used so sparingly that I still enjoy a small touch of it now and again. It brings me right back into the hustle of Sana'a and the bustle of men and little children taking inconspicuous glimpses of the Western tourist in the black turtle neck, standing enamored in the perfumery. 

This time, Ethiopia. Since I moved to the small farm in rural Pennsylvania, a place like Ethiopia seemed only another planet. I'd sewn myself into the fields and the trees and the grass and the enormous weight of care that comes with owning a farm and two horses. I'd dedicated myself, my entire being to that farm; its rolling hills, its long gravel driveway, the gift of its breeze, and the destitution of its February days. My days had become a swirl of  maintaining a regular job, and a well-kept home. I had always innately been tied at the soul to my horses, and this was no different. I had these magical creatures there with me, every day, and I owed them, and some ways sacrificed what I always knew was the beautiful unique lightness - buoyancy - of world travel.

Once those large international jets lift to the sky, you are helpless. You are helpless to your daily procedure, to getting distracted from your path, to veering here and there trying to keep up with life's dust. You are given a seat and besides a small walk down the aisle to stretch your cramping limbs, that is where you stay, floating buoyantly above the earthly pull of gravity. As I slept and woke fitfully during my the first leg of my flight from Baltimore to the UK, I did feel buoyant. It was the most buoyant I had felt in a very long time, maybe since I packed the small vile of honey perfume in my suitcase before taking to Sana'a's sky.

For 12 hours, I was stowed away in London. Few people knew the time and space I was occupying, and there was something magical about that too - occupying a space where nothing can be demanded of you, where no one has too many assumptions about you, yet; where you haven't yet tasted the air before a heavy rain or watched the sun as it folds in and out of the clouds, or been trapped in the corners of disappointment and despair. During my short hiatus in London, I took a trip on the tube to Covent Garden, a place that was a little too upscale for my comfort, yet alive enough to awaken in me a yearning to go back and spend more time.

Again, up, up and away, another night I spent buoyantly floating up there in the sky. This leg of the flight was entirely more lively than the last. Ethiopia had infused the walls of that big jet. The smell of the food, the aroma of the women as they sifted by in their soft white dresses and colorful head scarves and the little children, sounds which might have otherwise aggravated me trapped in some room or small restaurant, placated me.

Like many of us spoiled NGO workers are some times, I am now in my ironically nice, comfortable hotel room. Like them all before, these hotels have big walls and gates that only give us glimpses of the real city behind our walls. The tall buildings of Addis Ababa are calling out to me. I can see them, there, but they are still out of reach. I floated buoyantly in the hotel pool behind those walls and could have been up there in the sky again. I could have be anywhere, an entirely different person, as the water gifted me another moment of silence and solace that had been absent for far too long. Water, travel, flying through the sky heals.

I do good work, we all try to, but these places we travel to, these moments, and many of the people we meet along the way undoubtedly give us far, far more than they could possibly take from us. Ethiopia, thank you for taking me in, if only for a few days. I already know I will take you with me when I am back in the sky and inevitably when I land at the hooves of my horses.

Tribute to Meghan, Class of 1998

As a group of 38 young women, the Class of 1998 was one of the smallest classes to pass through the halls of Agnes Irwin. We not only knew each other by name, but even the least likely of friends realized some intimate detail about each others’ lives. So when cancer stole one of us away earlier this year, more than a decade after many of us had last seen her, we felt a palpable loss.

On February 5, 2011, at 30 years of age, our dear friend Meghan Murphy left this world.

While at Agnes Irwin, Meghan was a leader, always balancing academics with issues she felt passionately about. She not only sat on the student-faculty committee, she was active in advancing race relations among the study body and was a member of umoja—which in Swahili means unity. She was one of the few students who participated in a committee to recognize gender awareness, and she expressed her deep commitment to public service through her representation on Agnes Irwin’s community service board. She rowed on the crew team, but more importantly, she acted as a positive force between the different personalities in our small class. Her humor brought lightness to our classrooms, and her friendship was important to so many of us. Often inspired by Meghan, we selected her to speak at our graduation in Bryn Mawr. While sitting there together listening to her beautiful speech, it was difficult to discern between tears of laughter and tears of sadness. Her speech struck that perfect chord between nostalgia, anticipation for the future, and a sense of history.

Following her young career at Agnes Irwin, Meghan attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where her commitment to the environmental movement flourished. After graduating from Cornell in 2003, she stayed among the hills, gorges, and the one great, long finger lake that comprises Ithaca, to start a biodiesel company and to become the editor of the book, Biodiesel America, which later became a movie. She volunteered at a local hospice care facility and threw the rest of her energy into working for T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Project, the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. Like Dr. Campbell, Meghan was a fierce advocate of sustainable living and the vegan diet. She was also a soul-searcher, and from Ithaca, traveled to India to partake in a spiritual retreat. For Meghan, no adventure was too big. No cause she felt passionately about was unworthy of her sacrifice.

When she found out she would have to battle cancer, she tackled it head on, staying positive and seemingly hopeful during her last year with us. Through an online journal, she reconnected with many of us, writing about her struggles, making us laugh, when all we wanted to do was cry. One of the most telling photographs of Meghan posted last year was of her hula hooping on the beach in Florida—where she sought treatment and care—with a grand smile on her face.

As Meghan’s spirit looked around at those of us attending her funeral service, she saw a reflection of herself. Songs sung by her friends filled the halls of the Ithaca church. Each friend and family member who spoke recalled her energy and enthusiasm for life. Collectively, we buried Meghan on top of a large Ithaca hill, in a nature conservancy, far from the sounds of the roads below. The wind whipped snow to our brows and we followed a large draft horse that pulled a sled carrying Meghan’s body, which was wrapped in a biodegradable cloth. She became part of the Earth, as it always was a part of her—to the singing voices of those who loved her.

…Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.

Dear Meghan, may you rest in peace.

Traveling through Vagus

I almost traveled again today, to somewhere otherworldly, through my vagus nerve. I was reading about how a bump on my leg could be sarcoma, or cancer, and I almost passed out.

The Vagus Nerve. It slows the blood pumping from our hearts. But sometimes mine malfunctions. Hemorrhage, self-destruction, starvation have broken it. Things that I fear, things that disturb me, often attack my vagus nerve, and break it. My mind assists with the havoc. It produces images that just don’t want to leave—the protruding ribs of a sick child, the arm of a heroine user, me on a surgeon’s table having cancerous cells scraped away. At those times, the blood moves rapidly from my heart, and I churn out all my defenses: liters of water, raising my feet horizontally, hanging my head between my knees, pretty thoughts. But before long, my feet start to tingle, my body shivers, my armpits sweat. The room sits under a heavenly light. And I fall from reality. I enter another world, where time, as we know it, ceases to exist. The seconds or minutes spent by those around me scrambling to wake me up, to raise me back into consciousness are, to me, days, months, sometimes years. While there, I’ve been under a horse’s hooves, I’ve had children dancing around me, I’ve been lying in a field of grass watching the sun set. I see people I haven’t seen in years. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to a coma, or death.

I’ve landed on carpets, bathroom floors, sidewalks, and stair wells. One time my head only slumped back while I remained seated in my chair. I’ve acquired large bumps on the back of my head, rug burn on my face, bruises on my knees, depending on how I fall. I’ve woken up with a smile on my face, crying, and in a hospital bed, always feeling as if my whole life has been drained from me. One time, when my vagus nerve was at its worst, I had a seizure.

My dysfunctional vagus nerve destroys my chance of ever entering medicine, being an injecting drug user, or maybe giving birth; for the better or for the worse.

I once thought the nerve would eventually become more insensitive, beating away slowly, lackadaisically, mechanically functioning as it should. As I grew older, I thought I would better be able to cope with the world’s demons, to better hide my fears, by inconspicuously remaining vertical despite a racing mind. But I’m fairly certain, at this point, that this condition is inherent; that the vagus nerve will continue to plague me. And as I age, I am almost certain that my vagus nerve will constantly remind me it’s there, not to be forgotten. Like most people, my health will worsen as my hair turns gray, which will require more trips to the doctor, more bad diagnoses, more surgeries, more blood work, more of the unpretty.

My mind, my affinity for all things of misery doesn’t help. I work in public health, a world of statistics about death and disease. I watch films about mothers giving birth and dying in a pool of blood because they couldn’t get to a hospital, infants whose diarrhea is so watery and persistent that it shrivels them up, eventually sucking the life right from them. I stood in a room and stared at a dead, gray, stillborn fetus. I write sad stories in an effort to produce a visceral reaction among my readers. I try to dissociate. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not. If I’m doing my job well, it’s not.

So, occasionally the world will just be too much for my vagus nerve, and it will call it quits for seconds, or minutes. And maybe that is how I will be able to survive, by checking out for a while, traveling to somewhere more beautiful, when things become too ugly. Maybe, in reality, the vagus nerve is saving my life.

A New Sort of Wanderlust

I am not in wanderlust right now, at least not in the true sense of the word. I am not writing to the sound of Yemen’s call to prayer, from the Nigerien desert, or from Bali’s silent shores. I am sitting in my house, sipping wine, listening to Rachael Yamagata – but I feel so very far away.

It’s been a strange 24 hours. Yesterday, an old friend of mine passed away. At age 30, a cancer expanded and manifested, until it took her lungs, her heart, and her life. Meghan died only a day prior to the anniversary of my grandfather’s death – February 5 – such a strange day it will be always.

I can still hear her voice. She wasn’t my best friend. She wasn’t my sister. I hadn’t seen her in years, but she stayed with me. I remember listening to her give the closing speech at our high school graduation, with tears in my eyes. Because that is how Meghan rolled. She could make a sour soul laugh. She could reach inside us all with her smile. She could move us, but subliminally. I admired her. She lived organically. She lived to save the planet, but she couldn’t save herself.

She taught me things — about her lessons on dying. She stayed positive as she lost pound after pound, healthy cell after healthy cell. She kept making me laugh, when all I wanted to do was cry. She swung herself around, hula hooping on the beach. She walked in the sand. She tried hard to stay with the living. She got jealous of her friends with silver hair. Oh, if only she could age and grow old with her loved ones. She tricked us all, in her ascent to heaven. I thought she would always be among us — the living. She said that dying made her feel younger. She was smaller, more dependent, less herself as a woman. Her life froze and went in reverse. She couldn’t shift it the other way, although she tried her hardest.

And through it all, she wrote and shared her life with those around her. The online narrative that encapsulated her last months on Earth made me feel so very close to her. So, when I got the news that I wouldn’t be hearing from her anymore, I felt deeply saddened. I felt cheated.

Through all of this, I’ve never been a great believer in heaven. But today, things changed. My mind kept traveling there, to somewhere otherworldly. And a deep sense of calm prevailed. Meghan’s spirit was so big that it has to be somewhere. Life wouldn’t make sense if she ceased to exist. So, yes, Meghan is out there, up there, around there, here, everywhere. There just can’t possibly be any other way. Meghan has been stirring in my mind, teaching me things all day long. I thought of her as I rode my horse, and I felt more at peace, more positive than I ever had atop the horse before. Thank you, Meghan. Because me and that horse, we are here, and well, and we have what seems like all the time in the world. I only wish Meghan had the same.

While she is traveling around out there, getting acclimated to her new surroundings, I am traveling too. And with this, I am changing the meaning of this blog – to not just be about travel around this globe, but the traveling we do every day. Although it was a story of the most tragic sort, I traveled to Meghan, with Meghan. I heard Meghan through her writings, and I felt close to her because of her will and spirit to keep us with her. I hope I can keep you with me.

Meghan, as so many others have said, we'll miss hearing from you, may you travel in peace.